The present invention generally relates to sealing vials or bottles with caps and, more specifically, to manually operated crimping devices used for such purposes.
In the area of scientific or medical testing, for example, small vials may be filled with a liquid and sealed with an appropriate cap. Some vials and caps may include mating threads for securing the cap to the vial and other caps may be pressed or snapped onto the vial. The present invention is related to vials that require a cap or seal to be crimped onto the open end of the vial. These vials may be referred to as crimp top vials and the crimp cap or seal must often be connected to the vial in a hermetically sealed manner.
In many testing facilities, it is common to use a manually operated cap crimping device essentially comprising a set of jaws actuated by a pair of handles to crimp a cap onto the open end of a vial. One such crimping device may be obtained from National Scientific Company, based in Lawrenceville, Ga., under Catalog No. C4012-100. Although several types of manually operated crimping devices are known, each type generally requires that the user manually place a cap onto the vial before each crimping operation. That is, these devices do not feed caps to the crimping mechanism. Quite often, a testing laboratory may be automated to handle the testing of several hundred or thousands of vials of liquid per day. In gas chromatography testing, for example, automated sampling devices may utilize trays holding one hundred or more sealed vials. When lab technicians or other scientific or medical personnel are dealing with such high numbers of test vials each day, the manual crimping operation is quite time consuming and labor intensive.
For at least the above reasons, it would be desirable to provide various improvements to manually operated crimping devices for allowing the user to more quickly and efficiently fill and seal numerous vials or bottles, while still enabling the use of a relatively simple and inexpensive manually operated cap crimping device.